What is it about a grifter from Queens who neither knows nor cares about you, who has neither principles nor plans, that makes people love him. Not merely support him or want to vote for him, but adore him. Putting a flag with his name on a truck, comparing him with a deity, being willing to fight a cop and storm a building for him? Krugman thinks he knows.
Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.
So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.
No, it’s not the loss of jobs or money, per se, which create the setting for the problem but aren’t themselves the problem.
While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.
This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”
Still, according to Krugman, the rural rage doesn’t manifest in finding ways to solve the problem, to enhance the dignity of white, rural, unemployed men, but in finding their voice in someone whose only contribution to the polity is grievance.
In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
***
The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.
Is he right or is this just another example of the educated urban elites trying to make sense of a phenomenon that can’t be rationally explained? It’s one thing to believe in traditional values, and to eschew progressive efforts to reimagine America in blue hair, but does that explain the adoration of politician who, if you were on the ground aflame, wouldn’t be bothered to piss on you unless there was something in it for him?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply, with extreme prejudice.
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I grew up in one of those small towns and my father and his friends are some of those small-town men that so readily love Trump. To hear him talk, I don’t see it as him loving Trump, or even liking him all that much. I certainly don’t think he’s under any illusion that Trump would like him. What he says is that Trump “tells it like it is,” that he speaks in a blunt and un-pretentious way. The fact that he’s made fun of for having a limited vocabulary and liking fast food speaks to men like my father- “he might be an asshole but he’s not a pretentious asshole who acts like he’s better than me because he’s fancy.”
A lot of hay gets made over Trump’s various -isms because of who he talks badly about, and certainly there’s truth there. Men like my father aren’t known for being welcoming and accepting of people not like themselves. But when Trump tells rural America “you have problems and it’s all Their fault,” looking too hard at who he blames overlooks what I think is the real reason the message resonates: he recognizes their problems. Pop culture portrays men like my father as stupid and backward. They live simple lives that they had to claw and break their bodies doing manual labor for, and then hear on TV that they’re privileged oppressors. They hear one loud voice saying “Yeah, you’re kind of getting screwed,” and they support him just because they hear him acknowledge them.
Trump gets traction because the Democrats present as smug elitists. Which is part of the irony. People don’t like to feel that they are being talked down to by condescending politicians. Some people feel that Trump’s crass delivery is targeting these same elitists, and that Trump is striking a blow on their behalf. That is, he is saying things that some people would like to say to the elites but don’t have the platform to be heard. It’s allvery troubling.
About 14% of Americans live in rural areas, and not all of those are white voters. Rural white voters may have played a role in electing Trump, and in his present support, but it clearly wasn’t and isn’t a dominant role.
Krugman would be more honest if he used the name given to the people he dislikes – the deplorables.
2016 was the deplorables saying to the rest of America “Can you hear us now?” It wasn’t about Trump but about rejecting what is being forced upon them.
The answer, as the relentless persecution of Trump in office and the present tsunami of lawfare shows, was a resounding “Shut up!” It’s clear to deplorables that not only will they never be heard, but that they have been targeted for elimination.
Most deplorables aren’t stupid. They know full well that this politician, like all politicians, is out for themselves. They support Trump not because they like him, but because Trump threatens the established order.
Certainly change can make things worse. But what choices are the deplorables offered?
If anything, weirdly venerated individuals are more of a norm than an anomaly for our culture. Whether pop celebrity, martyr, or mercenary envoy, the loyalty is to the mythical narrative, not the person. The undeserving qualities may in fact be a correlating factor in landing the role. He’s a vessel for the hatred toward corrupted and toxic institutions on one hand, and for the contempt the institutions have for the public on the other, in a self-sustaining exothermic reaction.
Krugman is partially correct but education or more precisely the lack of education is the main reason Trump is popular with the rednecks. The popularity of social media is also a huge factor. Trump targeted those who watch “wrasslin” and motor sports, read the National Enquirer, and are evangelist Christians. And I believe racism plays a large part, too, as Trump owes his name recognition more to his “birtherism” tweets than anything else. Looking back to the mid-1960’s rural voters have mostly been a republican staple anyway. MLK and the civil rights movement caused a tremendous shift from the democrat party to the GOP.
Ah, the ever persuasive “you are too uneducated (aka stupid), provincial and racist to vote in my own best interests” argument.
Trump is unabashedly anti-democracy. More so than any other mainstream candidate that has ever run for president. He is doing his best to undermine any rule of law that he doesn’t personally like. He stands for nothing other than self-aggrandizement. So, yes, voting for him is dumb and not in anyone’s best interest unless they know they’re really trying to end the American Experiment.
The fact that he crushed the Republican Primaries as hard as he has worries me greatly for the future of American Democracy.
Hi Mike P. What a steaming pile of bs. Nothing more need be written….
Sincerely Drew
“Trump owes his name recognition more to his “birtherism” tweets than anything else.”
Not even a bit from the 15 seasons of The Apprentice right?
I have many close family members who are on the Trump train. None believes he is honest. None believes he cares for them.
What they do see:
1. Trump says the obvious things that no one else is willing to say.
2. Democrats are really out to get Trump. (Otherwise stated, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.)
“And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” -Obama
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” -Clinton
Combine the condescension which Democrats express toward their opponents with the fact that the environmental left expressly wants to take the remaining blue collar resource extraction careers from rural towns.
Why does it surprise anyone that people who live in those areas will grasp at straws and support the belligerent jerk who at least says he’ll try to help them?
Trump succeeded because many people see through the narrative and he’s the only one on the ballot willing to say so.
The political machinery of America wants to blame whites (especially males) for all the nation’s ills, then is shocked when the one guy who defends that demographic gets traction. The only baffling thing is that anyone is baffled.
I recently moved from Charlotte to a rural part of North Carolina. My neighborhood includes farms, wooded properties, palatial estates, and mobile homes on mud lots surrounded by garbage. Not far from here are 3 small towns. So far I haven’t met anyone who isn’t gainfully employed. Most of the people who live in this area are Christian. Even if they don’t go to church, they hold Christian values (work hard, be honest, mind your own business). I don’t see any resentment based on economics nor education (or lack of it). What I see is horror at the undermining of American values by the uniparty. Churches are leaving their denominations, because those denominations are trying to push woke values on them. This has been successful in the cities. Enter a city church and you are likely to see rainbows and pride flags.
I believe that the primary difference between urban and rural voters is that urban voters have nothing to do after work, so they sit around in front of the TV, or computer, and take in the garbage that our media-industrial complex pumps out. People in the country are busy. After work they go out to the garage or the garden. Also, many of us go to church and talk to real people, so we hear what our friends and neighbors really think, instead of reading a curated subset of opinion that is approved by social media censors.
The love for Trump is not a love for him personally. It started out as a rejection of Uniparty values, and now a substantial component of it is rejection of the dishonest lawfare and media lies that have targeted him throughout his political career. Many rural people were at the Capitol during the “riot.” They know what they saw, and they know that the media and the “justice” department are lying to them and unjustly persecuting people who were there, and so the lawfare being conducted against Trump strikes a nerve. If the establishment wanted to create overwhelming rural support for Trump, they wouldn’t have done anything different.
Dogmatic urban elites, attempting an explanation based on their flawed understanding of the world.
I live in a rural area in a state dominated by urban areas. The animus toward city dweller and their imposition of luxury beliefs and virtue signaling is very real. Trump was a necessary shock to the system and Biden is disliked. Interestingly it follows zip codes and affluence. The wealthier areas had Biden lawn signs the less wealthy Trump signs. I think Trump has outlived his usefulness.
I also think Krugman is an East Coast urban elitist every dit as out of touch as David Brooks. I like living in the sticks where I have nature and space and not the city with used needles and petty crime
I strongly considered voting for him in 2016, because the Democrats wanted to make ACA (Obamacare) mandatory. My savings were pretty good, but my income wasn’t high enough to qualify for the subsidy. I would have been required to pay more for insurance than for everything else put together, insurance that I didn’t want and never would have used. It would have made me go bankrupt by now, after which I would be allowed to sign up for Medicaid. To remain on Medicaid I’d then be required to never accumulate any money. And the Democrats seemed to be completely unaware of people like me. They declared ACA a total success.
When asked about the cause of the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s foreign minister (his son-in-law) replied, “We just hated each other!” it would help a lot if “you” would just leave “us” alone, but “you” are not capable of that.
Are we finally finshed now? Thank you SHG for restraining yourself. Everybody is so schmart these dayz, and yet the potholes keep coming back and the rhetoric never ends. Now back to my Reggae music, the best in my book. Miss my Jamaican girlfriend. Was too old and not rich enough. Ouch, that hurts!